Young Girl
by Aerlinnel
Summary: In a certain bathroom, Mimi confronts the memory of her predecessor and realizes just how similar they are. Roger cameos. Set during Rent, sometime between Christmas and Halloween.


It was the kind of afternoon that I just adored. The loft was empty except for Roger and me, and hushed except for the spring rain pattering against the windows. Even the roaches were quiet for a change as they skittered in the walls. The two of us had slept in late that morning, and it was still hours from when I'd have to get ready to go to work. For that afternoon, we might as well have been the only people on earth.

Roger was folded around his guitar, as usual, and I sat at the opposite end of the couch, doodling on a stolen sheet of paper. There were half a dozen pens scattered on the cushions between us – for whatever reason, Roger always did his writing in black pen, fine-point felt tips when he could get them, which he then hoarded like little treasures. I'd have thought that pencils would be more practical, considering how much scribbling and scratching out he did, but then, I'm not the songwriter.

I gazed at my songwriter for a minute, feeling a warm happy thing wriggle in my stomach, before glancing back down at my paper. When I was little, I'd dreamed of becoming a fashion designer, and I still liked inventing clothes. I rotated the paper slightly and squinted at it, then drew off another sweeping curve with my pen. I had created a lanky, leggy model that looked like Maureen, and I was busy decking her out in a ridiculous outfit – patched, patterned leggings, a belted velvet tunic, and an extravagant sleeveless floor-length leather coat. She looked a little like some sort of superhero – not that that would bother Maureen in the least. And Angel would love that coat. Maybe I would show it to her later.

"Morning is a dream, a pause in – gap; no…" Roger was muttering again, half-formed lyrics taking shape under his breath. It was a good sign, though, when he muttered as he wrote. And sure enough, his pen was flashing over the page on his knee, crossing out and rewriting as fast as his hand could move. Then – "Damn." He glanced up at me, a preoccupied frown wrinkling his forehead. "Meems, do you have an extra piece of paper? I'm out of room here."

I looked at my superhero model Maureen, then tucked my pen between my fingers and tore off the half of the sheet that I hadn't used. He flashed me a smile as he reached for it, saying, "Thanks, baby," before his muttering resumed.

I smiled in response and set to elaborate on Maureen's hair – and noticed the streak of black across the back of my hand. "Oh, God," I sighed, exasperated, as I turned my palms up and found more inkstains. Well, the loft's selection of cold and cold running water wouldn't do much, but at least Mark had bought soap with the last groceries. I hoped.

Roger looked up as I uncurled myself from the couch. "Where're you going?"

"Tattoos." I showed him my hands. "Maybe I can get them off before they're permanent."

He grinned as I headed for the bathroom. A few more random notes twanged, then he called, "I love you, Mimi."

He always said it when I went into the bathroom.

I blew him a kiss over my shoulder, wondering if he even consciously noticed the connection.

* * *

A few minutes of scrubbing got most of the ink off, and I rubbed my hands on my skirt, as much to warm them back up as to dry them. Then I looked in the mirror.

Brown eyes, brown hair, coffee-colored skin, everything familiar. But it was strange, with this mirror – I always had the sense that if I turned quickly or peered close enough, I would catch a glimpse of coppery hair, or maybe a pair of laughing green eyes. As I leaned closer, I could see that the glass was spattered with flecks of toothpaste and water, giving it freckles.

I touched the mirror lightly, and my eyes slid automatically to the shower.

I knew the details, of course, or at least most of them. I had gone to Mark one day – knowing better, somehow, than to ask Roger – intending to wring the story out of him. In the end, though, he spilled it out with hardly a fight, as if he needed to tell someone, as if his own narration of the day had been bottled up inside him for too long. His blue eyes were stormy as he spoke, hating himself all the while for telling me, for unleashing the ghosts of the loft on me, I suppose. He didn't understand that I _needed _to know. It was a piece of the tragic, mesmerizing, beautiful puzzle that was Roger.

I ran my fingertips over the counter. _Here was the note, written in black felt-tip pen_, I thought. I took one, two, three steps, to stand next to the shower. _Here is where Roger fell to his knees, screaming_. I shuddered and took a deep breath. Then I stared down in front of me. _Here…_

It was just an ordinary shower stall, a little in need of cleaning. Mark had told me how it had practically sparkled after…after it happened. Maureen had used up all of the soap in the apartment and scrubbed for hours – "the only time she ever cleaned in this place, really" – long after the visible stains had disappeared.

I eased myself down to the floor next to the stall, tracing designs with my fingers on the cool metal frame. "April," I said softly, testing the name. "April. Painter. Poet."

It felt a little like an incantation as I sat there, knees folded to my chest in a mirror image of how Mark had found her, but it never occurred to me to be uneasy, or uncomfortable, or afraid. I could only think of how much we had in common, this stranger girl and I.

I remembered every detail of the day my life was changed in that clinic. I could still feel the texture of the paper in my hands; I could hear the cool, professional voice of the doctor as she began to outline my options for treatment. I remembered how the reality took minutes to sink in, and even then it only came as a rising silent scream of denial in my head. I remembered the sudden emptiness at my side – because I had gone to the clinic with a man, of course, but we hadn't yet reached that infatuated phase of abandoning caution and protection, and his test had come back negative. He drove me back to my apartment, and I never saw him again after that.

Maybe that's where my story diverged from April's. The desertion was cowardly and clear-cut, and honestly, it pissed me off. It gave me a plain old understandable anger that I could hold on to, when the rest of my world seemed to be twisting into blood tests and AZT regimens. I wanted to show him what he had thrown away. That was when I quit my job at the diner and started working at the Cat Scratch Club. Disease or no, I could still bring a roomful of men to their feet, or to their knees. And – well, it's hard to be at the center of so many eyes and so much desire without feeling a pulse of life.

It's not that I didn't have my own hell to go through. There were entire days that I spent staring at a knife in my hands, or a bottle of painkillers, or a stack of dime bags. But somehow, no matter how black my mood was, there was always a thread of contempt in it. Mamá would have scolded me for such self-pity, I thought – glossing over the fact that she would more likely have swept me into her arms and sobbed if she'd known that her baby had HIV. I even did impressions for myself of how she would have reacted: "Mimi Gabriela Marquez, I'm ashamed! Didn't I teach you to be grateful for what God gave you, _hija_? A brain and a strong body, and you are going to throw them away? _¡Debería darte vergüenza!_"

In my own voice, I tried to answer her: "Mamá, I have a virus. I can't get rid of it, and it is going to become a disease that will kill me. I just don't know when that will happen. And I don't…I just can't deal with it, Mamá. It's not fair. I'm only eighteen. I don't want to die."

And there was where my sense of logic would object, every time. I didn't want to die, so I was going to kill myself? I would wrestle with the discrepancy for hours, crying, screaming, breaking things. And finally I would put away the knife, or sweep the drugs off the table. The truth, ultimately, was that I didn't want to die. I didn't know how long it would be before the virus took hold, but I was determined to have the days before that happened. It was my life, and I chose to live it.

So why, then – how did April come to throw hers away? She had everything that I had, and more – supportive friends, a chance for treatment, a good man who loved her wildly. And still it wasn't enough to convince her that life was worth hanging on to.

"You almost destroyed him," I said through gritted teeth. Despite myself, my breath was coming faster, the nails of my free hand digging into the palm. I saw Roger shaking and crying through withdrawal, screaming for the one who should have been there to help him – the girl who had left him so cruelly and abruptly alone.

And then my hand froze in its movement over the frame of the shower stall, as I came to a sudden realization.

As Mark remembered, it was almost certain that she had passed the virus to Roger, not the other way around.

In her mind – she _had _killed him.

The anger evaporated, as my eyes suddenly watered. "Oh, _pobrecita_," I whispered. "That's why, isn't it? You didn't feel sorry for yourself. You blamed yourself for him."

Roger. My Roger, and hers. I hadn't met him until a year after he was diagnosed, and I knew how much a year could do in making you almost used to a thing. I knew the older, sadder, but wiser Roger, who took his AZT and tracked his T-cell count and wrote songs out of a urgent need to leave something meaningful behind.

But she had known him before: before AIDS was a part of his life, when he was a true rising rock star with his whole long life in front of him. She had known the fire that burned in him, that I only saw in flashes now and then, deep behind his eyes. How would it have felt to be the one to extinguish that?

I rubbed at the goosebumps on my arms. "_Chica_…" I hesitated. Why did I feel this need to reassure the dead – as if anything I could say would make a difference?

An old saying from my Catholic childhood – English, but Mamá couldn't have put it any better in Spanish – came to my mind: _There but for the grace of God go I_. The heroin, the needles, the less-than-perfect track record with men; it wasn't that I was better than April, just that I was lucky enough to have found out about the disease before I gave it to anyone else. Much less someone that I loved.

I pulled myself to my knees and spoke quickly, earnestly. "April. He doesn't blame you, _chica_, know this. I promise. He still loves you. I wish…" I paused, wiping at the wetness on my cheek, then finished in a whisper: "I would rather he had lived a long, happy life with you, than had just a little while with me." And from the chill down my spine, I knew it was true.

I don't know how long I knelt there, grieving for the girl – and the innocent young man – I'd never known. When I did get to my feet, my knees felt flattened from the cold linoleum. I splashed cold water on my face and rubbed it dry. Then I gazed back down into the shower stall. "April," I said softly, "I swear—"

What did I swear? That I would try to love Roger enough for her and me both, that I would never resent her place in his heart, that I would be there for him as she couldn't be, and so much more. There were not enough words to say it out loud. So I repeated, simply, "I swear." If she could hear me, she would understand.

* * *

Roger, when I left the bathroom – was still completely absorbed in his guitar. I shook my head in affectionate resignation. He probably hadn't even noticed how long I'd been gone. Then a floorboard squeaked under my foot and he looked up quickly.

"I love you," he said again, and his smile was colored with relief, subconscious but real. He _had _noticed, then.

I crossed the loft to stand behind him and wrapped my arms around him, resting my chin on his shoulder. "I love you too, Roger," I whispered into his ear. As I said it, I could almost hear the echo of another voice underneath mine.

* * *

Note: _No hablo español. _Thanks to Wordreference:  
_hija_: "daughter"  
_¡Debería darte vergüenza!_:"You ought to be ashamed!"  
_pobrecita_: "poor little thing (feminine)"


End file.
